1. Field of the Invention
Methods and apparatuses consistent with the present invention relate to a routing protocol, and more particularly, to a data routing method and apparatus which may optimize a data route considering a link cost between nodes.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, communication technologies in wire communications as well as wireless communications are being rapidly developed. Particularly, the number of users using wireless communication services such as the Internet has dramatically increased, and users' desire to use communication services anytime and anywhere has increased. Also, pocket-sized and multi-functional mobile terminals become popular, and thus wireless communication services will be more widely used.
However, communication bandwidth in wireless networks is limited, and a small amount of energy is required to be used for communications. Also, most wireless networks are configured to be able to communicate with each other using multi-hop routings between nodes without help from particular base networks. In such environments, how routes are established between nodes is critical. Particularly, since each node dynamically moves in ad-hoc networks, it is crucial to efficiently establish and maintain routing paths from source nodes to destination nodes.
Generally, routing protocols exist to discover optimal routes for transmitting packets. ‘Hop counts’ are mainly used as the standards for selecting routing paths. Specifically, routes having minimum hop counts from among routes between source nodes and destination nodes are selected as optimal routing paths.
When minimum hop counts are the standards for selecting routing paths, average distances between selected hops increase, and thus signal to noise ratio (SNR) increases. Accordingly, packet loss may not be prevented.
Also, although the number of hop counts is identical, link states between nodes may be different. Accordingly, it is ineffective to uniformly apply minimum hop counts to the standards for selecting routing paths, since faulty wireless links between nodes included in minimum hop counts may exist. Specifically, packet loss may increase, and power may be wasted. Accordingly, hop counts and link costs of each wireless link are required to be considered to select optimal routing paths.
Thus, a data routing method and apparatus which may optimize a selected data route based on a hop count is required.